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Era of Modern Baseball Stats Brings WAR to Booth

Astros broadcasters Steve Sparks, far left, and Robert Ford use stats new and old.Credit
David Manning for The New York Times

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Radio broadcasts of baseball games have filled the summer air for generations with plain-spoken voices of announcers leisurely walking their listeners through nine innings.

Now this piece of Americana — one-sided conversations that create a cozy intimacy between fans and announcers — is colliding with the cold calculations known as sabermetrics.

Statistical analysis has swept through baseball over the past decade, becoming part of the fabric of the game and an object of growing fascination to its fans. As players, managers and front office executives embrace the esoteric statistics, teams increasingly want their radio announcers just as fluent in the language of WAR, VORP and B.A.B.I.P. (Those stand for wins above replacement, value over replacement player and batting average on balls in play, for those of you dusting off your radios as the season begins.)

“They wanted a broadcaster who is at least comfortable with exploring the idea of discussing advanced statistics and what they mean,” said Robert Ford, 33, who was hired by the Houston Astros in the off-season, along with Steve Sparks, 48, a former pitcher, to call the team’s games. The advent of advanced statistical analysis, Mr. Ford said, has “changed the way we think about baseball.”

Now, as the two settle into the Astros’ broadcast booth, they and their colleagues across the country face a balancing act. How much do listeners want to know about these advanced numbers? How much is informative? And how much would prompt the audience, a group that spans all generations, to tune out?

Listeners and announcers alike say that striking the right balance will be a challenge.

When the Astros interviewed Mr. Sparks, a journeyman knuckleball pitcher, and Mr. Ford, a Bronx native who previously called minor league games, the topic of advanced statistics came up repeatedly. The Astros, who have eagerly embraced analytics, wanted to know if the broadcasters could grasp the data being used, in part, to build the team.

“We need them to tell the story of how we are making decisions and putting the organization together,” said George Postolos, the Astros’ president and chief executive, who added that the team would not want a broadcaster who was uncomfortable explaining the front office’s strategy.

To prepare for the season, Mr. Sparks prepared a stack of handwritten notes on opposing teams. Each page is crammed with statistics.

For Father’s Day last year, his 19-year-old daughter bought him a copy of “The Book,” a statistical exploration of the game. “I’m trying to learn as much about sabermetrics as I can,” he said.

Mark Patterson, a 27-year-old fan sitting in the stands for a recent Tampa Bay Rays spring training game, said he would like to hear more advanced statistical analysis but said it should be a “slow introduction process.”

“It takes a while to get everything down,” Mr. Patterson said as he and a friend, Warren Allen, 28, waited for the game to start.

In the Rays’ lineup that afternoon was Ben Zobrist, who may not be a staple of the highlight shows but who has become a well-known figure for fans of sabermetrics, a word derived from the abbreviation for the Society for American Baseball Research. Over the past four years, Mr. Zobrist has led baseball in WAR, ahead of stars like Albert Pujols, Ryan Braun and Robinson Cano.

Mr. Zobrist’s achievement in the WAR category — a measure of a player’s offensive and defensive contributions relative to others who play his position and could replace him — was noted in the Rays pregame notes given to members of the news media.

Mr. Patterson and Mr. Allen seemed to appreciate the recognition for Mr. Zobrist, who has also led the American League in a more traditional category over the past four years: walks.

The advanced numbers, Mr. Allen said, are “how you become aware of players like Zobrist who aren’t in commercials but still are great players.”

Photo

A score book used by Steve Sparks, a radio broadcaster for the Houston Astros.Credit
David Manning for The New York Times

To fans like these two, the metrics have become crucial to how they view the game, study it, enjoy it — and how they pick players in their fantasy leagues.

But some old-guard broadcasters have resisted adding obscure percentages and acronyms to their banter and game descriptions. Tom Hamilton, 58, who is entering his 24th year as the radio voice of the Cleveland Indians, said he believed listeners would rather hear stories from the clubhouse than statistics from spreadsheets.

“Nobody after a game is going to remember numbers you throw at them, but they might remember a story about a player,” Mr. Hamilton said.

In New York, listeners can get a taste of both styles. John Sterling, the longtime Yankees’ announcer, has shied away from the new metrics, saying “The more numbers you keep giving to the fans, the more people don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Howie Rose — the Mets’ radio announcer known for his catchphrase, “Put it in the books!” — said he had used sabermetrics more since working in the booth last year with Josh Lewin, a former Texas Rangers broadcaster. “The ones I like are the ones I can understand,” Mr. Rose said.

“I love WHIP because it’s instructive and easy to understand,” he said, referring to the statistic for walks plus hits per innings pitched.

If some radio broadcasts prove to be the last refuge for aphorisms and homespun baseball wisdom, television has more heartily embraced advanced statistics, using on-screen graphics to help explain them.

Last season, the Mets television crew used statistics from Bloomberg Sports to help explain why Ike Davis, the team’s first baseman, was struggling and why Matt Harvey, a pitcher, got off to a fast start.

“Our philosophy on the game broadcast is to educate, enlighten and entertain,” said Curt Gowdy Jr., the senior vice president for production and executive producer for SNY, which broadcasts Mets games. “We try to tell the viewer something they don’t know.”

Ken Singleton, an analyst for the Yankees for 12 years on the YES Network, said there was a learning curve to employing “modern-day baseball lingo” without alienating fans who are not interested.

“There are certain people who don’t want to be concerned with all of the statistics,” said Mr. Singleton, who played from 1970 to 1984 and who admitted that, like many fans, he does not understand all of the numbers. “They want to hear about the players and their backgrounds.”

As the Detroit Tigers played the Yankees in a recent spring game in Lakeland, Fla., Tigers radio announcer Dan Dickerson had baseball-reference.com, a statistics Web site, on his laptop’s screen in the broadcast booth. Also in front of him was a scorecard, where he could chart the progress of the game the old-fashioned way.

Mr. Dickerson, 54, who is starting his 14th year calling Tigers games, said he has been fascinated by statistics ever since he was a kid playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, a dice game with cards designed to recreate a player’s performance.

He said the key was to avoid using terms like “ultimate zone rating” or “defensive efficiency” without explaining them.

“When you start saying words like ‘efficiency’ during a broadcast, people’s eyes can glaze over,” he said.

Mr. Dickerson said he swore by the principle he learned from Ernie Harwell, the Tigers broadcasting legend, whom he replaced: “Get what is in front of you right, and everything else takes care of itself.”

David Waldstein and Andrew Keh contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Modern Stats Bring WAR to Broadcast Booth (B.A.B.I.P., Too). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe